


devil's train

by MiniNephthys



Category: A Hat in Time (Video Game)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Angst and Dark Comedy, Child Neglect, Deal with a Devil, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-07
Updated: 2019-07-07
Packaged: 2020-06-24 00:21:13
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,102
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19712515
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MiniNephthys/pseuds/MiniNephthys
Summary: Hat Kid sells her soul for something the Snatcher can't actually provide.  It's fine.  This is fine.





	devil's train

**Author's Note:**

> Snatcher's human appearance, when it appears, is based on [Ruka's design](https://rukafais.tumblr.com/post/184666926491/i-can-safely-say-there-has-never-been-a-character).

The latest town Hat Kid moved to has train tracks with no trains.

Just empty, silent tracks on the outskirts of the town. Nobody uses trains anymore anyway - she would know, because her parents are always traveling everywhere - so that doesn’t strike her as particularly weird. None of the places she moves to fill her with curiosity or anything other than resignation over having to learn the faces of a new set of classmates and hear the same questions again.

“Why don’t you talk more?” “Why do you always wear those weird hats?” “Why don’t you have a real name?”

She has a name, but it’s long, hard to spell and say. By the time she got everyone to say it right, she’d be moving across the planet again. ‘Hat Kid’ is easier. She signs her papers that way and her teachers accept it.

The only people who call her by her name are her parents, so she doesn’t hear it much.

Her parents aren’t neglectful. They always make sure there’s enough food for her to make herself dinner, and she’s never had to go to school with holes in her clothes. They get her a new hat each year for her birthday. She’s well taken care of, it’s just that they don’t love her.

Today is a Saturday, and like all Saturdays she’s left to entertain herself for the whole day. After a few hours of playing house with her hats, she decides that she’ll go exploring. She likes exploring; sometimes when she goes into shops, people give her free stuff. Or she runs into funny-looking people having interesting conversations. (For some reason, sometimes people assume because she doesn’t talk much, she doesn’t hear much either.)

If she walks along the train tracks, she’ll find the train station eventually. And train stations have employees who have bowls of suckers, or businesspeople talking on the phone loud enough for the whole room to hear. She grabs her umbrella in case it rains and heads towards her destination.

Finding the tracks is the easy part. Hat Kid squints into the distance, but in both directions all she sees is more track, with no sign of which way is closer to the station.

“Eenie, meenie, miney, mo…”

She turns to the left and starts walking, humming as she goes.

The tracks go for a very long way, or else she’s just very small, or both. She recognizes the backs of fewer and fewer buildings that she passes. To keep herself from getting too bored, she imagines the trains that used to run here. Long ones, short ones, yellow ones, black ones…

It’s gotten dark, all of a sudden. Hat Kid stops and looks around - no buildings in sight, just train tracks. Maybe she should turn around? She’s not supposed to go walking around at night…

But if she turns around now, that’ll be like giving up on finding the station, so of course she’s not going to do that. Her parents won’t be home until late again, it’s not like they’ll know how long she was out. Re-energized, she presses on.

The first non-train-track shape she sees isn’t a building, but a person. A tall person with a big, fancy cape. It’s probably hot to wear that in the daytime, Hat Kid thinks, and then realizes that he’s gotten a lot closer to her during the split second she was thinking that.

He smiles too wide. “Hey there, kiddo-”

She hits him with her umbrella.

Usually when she does that, people go ‘ow’ and start telling her what a disrespectful gremlin she is, but they also back away out of umbrella range. This guy just smiles wider like it didn’t even hurt. “Now now, don’t be like that. It’s not a crime to say hello, is it?”

It’s not, as far as she knows. She lowers her umbrella slightly, but still fixes him with a suspicious look.

“It’s pretty late to be outside by yourself, at your age.” His golden eyes are the brightest thing around for miles. “You waiting on a train?”

“Nuh.” There are clearly no trains here. Is this guy dumb? He must be really dumb. Hat Kid relaxes a tiny bit.

“Thought not~ So what brings you out here?” His smile gets even wider, showing sharp teeth. “Ooh, ooh, let me guess! Alone with nothing to do? No friends to spend time with?”

…well, it’s not like it isn’t obvious. “Uh-huh.”

“That’s too bad!” He throws an arm over her shoulder. She’s not sure his arm was long enough to do that a second ago. “Lucky for you, I just happen to be in the market for new friends! You see, I just love making people happy. Giving them everything they want in life. Wealth, power, fame…”

A piece of paper and a pen pop up in front of her. Hat Kid takes the paper in hand to read it over carefully. Some of the words are too big for her, but she gets most of it, including:

“…For my soul?”

The stranger shrugs. “Nothing in this world’s free, kid. You weren’t even using your soul anyway, right?”

Hat Kid thinks about it for a second. Only for a second.

Good kids have parents who love them, so she’s a bad kid, which means she’s going to hell anyway. Which means she doesn’t have anything to lose here and can only gain, right? Right.

With confidence, she signs the paper on the dotted line. Then she signs it again with her actual name, in case she has to to make it count.

“Hahahaha! No hesitation! I like that! Let me just take this off your hands…”

Hat Kid feels suddenly emptier. But not much emptier.

The man’s smile splits his face. “Alright, so what do you want in exchange for your immortal soul? Cake? Ice cream?”

“Hmm…”

* * *

The kid wants her parents to love her.

In hindsight, the Snatcher should’ve figured it was something like that. Even the worst of scum usually hem and haw before signing their soul away. For a little girl to sell her soul with no hesitation, she’d have to be a pretty fucked up home life.

Technically, the Snatcher doesn’t have the power to make anyone love anybody else. But he does have the power to control people, and that’s good enough. He can’t count the number of people who’ve asked for their crush to love them back and been satisfied by getting a girlfriend who’ll sleep with them at will.

Besides, the kid’s cute. Just making her parents spend more time with her should be enough to make them appreciate her more. Easy stuff. He plants the seeds of thought in the kid’s parents - ‘I should spend more time with my daughter’ - and forgets about it.

The next week, the kid comes out to the train tracks again.

When he appears this time, he doesn’t bother with the human form. She doesn’t look particularly startled by his actual appearance, which, props for a little girl.

“You want something else?” he asks.

She shakes her head and crosses her arms. “You didn’t do what I asked. They don’t love me.”

“That kind of stuff takes time, kiddo, even for somebody as powerful as me,” he says. “Give it a month or two.”

“…A month,” she says. “Or I’ll get mad.”

Sure you will, kid. He’s so scared.

* * *

A month passes, and Hat Kid’s parents don’t love her.

She can tell there’s been a change. Her parents spend more time with her. They take her out to movies and the zoo and buy her ice cream. But they’re on their phones all the time, and even when they are paying attention to her, it’s like they’re reading a script.

It’s not that hard to sneak out to the train tracks again. This time when the ghost-man shows up, she hits him with her umbrella first thing. It still doesn’t look like it hurt, but she feels a little better.

“Still don’t, huh?” he asks, floating a little bit away from her.

She shakes her head. “They’re just spending time with me ‘cause you told them too. Not ‘cause they want to be around me.”

“Look, kid, love is overrated. I could give you gold and diamonds, I could burn down your school…” As the ghost talks, a pile of gold dust appears in his left hand, while a flame hovers over his right. “I could make sure you never have to work a day in your life, you can live in the house you’ve always wanted. What do you care if two random people love you?”

She shakes her head more firmly this time. “You said you could give me anything. I want that.”

“You’ve got bad priorities.”

“Don’t care.”

“It’ll just hurt you more later.”

“Don’t care.”

“Ughhhh… fine, I’ll work on getting your stupid parents to have these stupid feelings.”

Hat Kid is increasingly dubious about the scope of this guy’s powers, but there isn’t much she can do at this point.

* * *

The Snatcher has never been in default on his contracts before.

Why would he? He’s powerful enough to do anything actually valuable. There’s no reason for him not to fulfill all his requests, as getting the soul at the end is worth it.

The punishment for defaulting on his contracts is… unpleasant. And, more importantly, lasts a literal eternity. The Snatcher prefers when that happens to other people.

The Snatcher can get this kid’s parents to spend more time with her, to ask about her day and her interests, to play games with her… But apparently they’re so emotionally distant that nothing he can think of can get them to actually love their own kid.

If the Snatcher were a better person, he would be more concerned about that and not the potential consequence to himself. But if he were a better person, he probably wouldn’t be buying souls.

“Look, kiddo. We need to have a talk.”

Hat Kid jumps a little, mostly because he appeared in her room without warning.

He sighs and drapes himself over the back of her dresser. “Let’s get to the chase. I don’t normally do this, but I’m willing to return your soul to you and null the contract.”

“Because you can’t do your job,” she says.

“Exactly, because I can’t - ughhh.” It’s not like she’s even wrong, which is the worst part. “You take your soul back, I don’t have to mess with your parents anymore, and you get to keep all the cake I’ve given you without penalty. It’s a fantastic deal, jump on that before I change my mind!”

“Nuh,” she says.

He almost stops smiling. Almost. “What do you mean, ‘nuh’?”

“Not gonna.”

“Kid, you’re not gonna go to hell just because your parents suck.” He doesn’t usually reveal to people why they really shouldn’t take his deals, but he’s getting a tiny bit desperate. “The smart thing to do is take it back.”

She sticks her tongue out at him, and he says something that is definitely inappropriate for someone her age.

* * *

So the deal stays. Even when she gets older and has a better sense of long-term consequences.

That guy stops trying to manipulate her parents at some point. It’s a little disappointing, but then again, she’s pretty sure mind controlling other people is bad. She’ll stick to asking him to get rid of her acne and get her into a nice college and give her a rent-free apartment. And to let her call him whenever she wants, of course.

Around when she’s considering whether to upgrade to a house is when she realizes she hasn’t been aging for a while.

“It’s your own fault, kid.” Nobody calls her a kid anymore except this guy. “I gave you the chance to back out and you didn’t take it, so now I’m not letting you die. As long as you don’t die, I didn’t break my part of giving you everything you want in life. It’s foolproof! Hahahaha!”

“Immortality doesn’t sound that bad?” she says.

He snorts. “Give it a few hundred years.”

She’s sure she can turn this around.

* * *

Good: the kid not dying means he can’t be sentenced to a state of pure torment forever.

Bad: the kid not dying means she can bug him whenever she wants, forever.

The Snatcher knows too much about pure torment to conflate the two or to think about just letting her die, but sometimes…

“BFF~~”

…a lot of the time, he wishes he hadn’t made that stupid deal in the first place.


End file.
